Virtual Water-Science Laboratory

About

About SWITCH-ON

SWITCH-ON is an EU-funded FP7 project with 15 partners across Europe (duration 2013 - 2017, grant agreement no. 603587). One main focus is to use open data to develop new forms of research in support of open science. We demonstrate a virtual lab, which includes the necessary software tools to support reproducible, computational experiments in hydrology.

About VWSL

Why use the Virtual Water Science Laboratory (VWSL) ?

The VWSL should facilitate collaboration and support reproducible experiments in water research. The goal is to overcome geographical distance for comparative hydrology and increase transparency when using computational tools in hydrological sciences. The VWSL gives access to open data through dedicated software tools for data search and upload, and helps creating protocols for joint experiments in the virtual environment. The SWITCH-ON VWSL will help you as a scientist with:

Cooperation around the world - helps you to connect with other scientists in comparative analyses and collaboration, as a mean to accelerate scientific advance in your research field.

Repeatability* of experiments – enables thorough review of a large variety of numerical experiments, which is a foundational principle in scientific research and will raise your standards.

New forms of scientific research – by using online ‘living’ protocols you can elaborate ideas incrementally with a large group of colleagues and share data, tools, models, etc. in open science.

The different stages of the Virtual Water Science Lab, illustrating cooperation, reproducibility and new forms of research

*Reproducibility is here defined as being able to reproduce others’ scientific findings. In computational hydrology, this can either be established by testing the same model with different data, or testing a different model or model set-up with the same data, or even testing a different model or model set-up with different data using the same workflow (protocol).